Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Sonic Youth: Sensational Fix

During my morning-off crawl through the internet, I stumbled across the Blownspeakers tumblr and his post on a pre-order for the upcoming Sonic Youth art book. Weighing in at a stunning kilo and a half and a whopping 784 pages, this is proving to be the ultimate document of the visual end of the long-running art-punk troupe. The book is actually a companion piece to the art exhibit which has been floating across Europe and is currently in Dusseldorf. I remember reading about this book af ew months back, but at the time it was only available in German or French and only available at the exhibit. Well it appears as if us English speaking folks are about to get our chance at this...and I do mean chance-- this fucker is limited to 600 copies. Sure, the book is $70 through Amazon as a pre-order (it's over $100 normally, did I mention shipping included from Amazon?!), but there are thousands of fans out there who are gonna want to eat this up asap.

I have to hand it to Sonic Youth and their tireless efforts in exposing me to many, many artists, filmmakers and writers that I may not have come across until much later in life if at all. Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Philip K. Dick, Gerhard Richter, William Gibson, Stan Brakhage, Richard Avedon, Savage Pencil, Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, and Richard Kern are just a few of the examples of artists I first heard about through the interviews, lyrics or the album covers of Sonic Youth. Don't even get me started on the bands that I've gotten hep to because of that foursome.

Here's a run down on the exhibit. Let's hope it makes it's way to this side of the world sometime soon.

1 comment:

I saw a similar exhibit years ago in LA's Chinatown. Just a room full of Sonic Youth posters and fliers. Never saw or heard of an art exhibit of one bands posters before. I thought it was a pretty cool idea.